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Categories: Ecology: Endangered Species, Space: Exploration

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In the autumn, when right whales swim towards the coasts of South Africa, they ought to be fat and stuffed full. But in recent years, they have become thinner because their food is disappearing with the melting sea ice.

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Globular clusters are the most massive and oldest star clusters in the Universe. They can contain up to 1 million of them. The chemical composition of these stars, born at the same time, shows anomalies that are not found in any other population of stars. Explaining this specificity is one of the great challenges of astronomy. After having imagined that supermassive stars could be at the origin, a team believes it has discovered the first chemical trace attesting to their presence in globular proto-clusters, born about 440 million years after the Big Bang.

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Astronomers have created a vast infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by piecing together more than one million images. These large mosaics reveal young stars in the making, embedded in thick clouds of dust. Thanks to these observations, astronomers have a unique tool with which to decipher the complex puzzle of stellar birth.

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Scalloped hammerhead sharks hold their breath to keep their bodies warm during deep dives into cold water where they hunt prey such as deep sea squids. This discovery provides important new insights into the physiology and ecology of a species that serves as an important link between the deep and shallow water habitats.

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A team used a first-of-its-kind technique to measure the expansion rate of the Universe, providing insight that could help more accurately determine the Universe's age and help physicists and astronomers better understand the cosmos.

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Scientists analyzed over a decade's worth of data about 16 young supermassive stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Supermassive stars typically are formed in pairs, but the new study found that all 16 of the stars were singletons. The findings support a scenario in which the supermassive black hole drives nearby stars to either merge or be disrupted, with one of the pair being ejected from the system.

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A tiny flightless midge which has colonized Antarctica's Signy Island is driving fundamental changes to the island's soil ecosystem, a study shows.

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Researchers observed exoplanet GJ 1214b's atmosphere by measuring the heat it emits while orbiting its host star. Astronomers directly detected the light emitted by a sub-Neptune exoplanet -- a category of planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

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Rhinoceros belong to a mammalian order called odd-toed ungulates that also include horses and tapirs. They are found in Africa and Asia. Until recently, evidence suggested that throughout their evolutionary history, gamma-retroviruses such as Murine leukemia virus had not colonized their genomes, unlike most other mammalian orders. The colonization process is called retroviral endogenization and has resulted in most mammalian genomes being comprised of up to ten percent retroviral like sequences.

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They're well known for their industrious work, but now a species of ant on Kangaroo Island is also showing that it is skilled at 'playing dead', a behavior that researchers believe is a recorded world first.

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For three years at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of students spent an estimated 56,000 hours analyzing the behavior of hundreds of solar flares. Their results could help astrophysicists understand how the sun's corona reaches temperatures of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

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Small-scale wildlife surveys can reveal the health of entire ecosystems, new research shows.

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Astronomers have revealed new evidence about the properties of the giant bubbles of high-energy gas that extend far above and below the Milky Way galaxy's center.

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Astronomers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, in order to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of our solar system in infrared light. But to their surprise, the dusty structures are much more complex than the asteroid and Kuiper dust belts of our solar system. Overall, there are three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star; that's 150 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. The scale of the outermost belt is roughly twice the scale of our solar system's Kuiper Belt of small bodies and cold dust beyond Neptune. The inner belts -- which had never been seen before -- were revealed by Webb for the first time.

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Half of plant proteins in the EU come from rapeseed plants. Until now, the plant has only been used for oil and animal feed, as it is both bitter and unsafe for human consumption. In a new study, researchers have gotten closer to removing the plant's bitter substances, and in doing so, are paving the way for a new protein source to support the green transition.

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A 'beautiful effect' predicted by quantum electrodynamics (QED) can explain the puzzling first observations of polarized X-rays emitted by a magnetar -- a neutron star featuring a powerful magnetic field, according to an astrophysicist.

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The young star TW Hydrae is playing 'shadow puppets' with scientists observing it with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. In 2017, astronomers reported discovering a shadow sweeping across the face of a vast pancake-shaped gas-and-dust disk surrounding the red dwarf star. The shadow isn't from a planet, but from an inner disk slightly inclined relative to the much larger outer disk -- causing it to cast a shadow. One explanation is that an unseen planet's gravity is pulling dust and gas into the planet's inclined orbit. The young star TW Hydrae is playing 'shadow puppets' with scientists observing it with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Now, a second shadow -- playing a game of peek-a-boo -- has emerged in just a few years between observations stored in Hubble's MAST archive. This could be from yet another disk nestled inside the system. The two disks are likely evidence of a pair of planets under construction.

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Scientists have observed a star swallowing a planet for the first time. Earth will meet a similar fate in 5 billion years.

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Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), researchers have found for the first time the fingerprints left by the explosion of the first stars in the Universe. They detected three distant gas clouds whose chemical composition matches what we expect from the first stellar explosions. These findings bring us one step closer to understanding the nature of the first stars that formed after the Big Bang.

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What would the Earth look like to an alien civilization located light years away? A team of researchers has used crowd-sourced data to simulate radio leakage from mobile towers and predict what an alien civilization might detect from various nearby stars, including Barnard's star, six light years away from Earth.